Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Basile Bedelek, Founder of Maison Kurtos, a Hungarian Chimney Cake company based in France.
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Here’s what Maison Kurtos is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Hungarian Chimney Cakes (Kürtöskalács) are delicious and not widely known outside Hungary.
The Solution:
Maison Kurtos brings homemade Chimney Cakes to France and sells them on local markets.
We are currently selling at 9 local markets throughout the week.
The Team:
I have loved cooking and baking since I was very young, and have always liked trying new pastries when traveling abroad. While at UC Berkeley, I completed the French Pastry Exam. I also completed an internship at Delivery Hero, which taught me a lot about the food industry. I am a solo founder and have grown my team to 5 people now. Two people are now working in the food trucks at local markets and two interns are working on business expansion.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I completed an internship in Venture Capital in Budapest, Hungary and while I was there I ate a lot of Chimney Cakes. Chimney Cakes are a traditional Hungarian dessert. They are sweet bread, cylinder-shaped with a hollow center. That's why they're called Chimney Cakes in English (Kürtöskalács in Hungarian, which does not at all translate to the same thing).
When I came back to France I didn't have a chance to eat any, because they're not really sold here. I've always been interested in baking and pastry, so I decided to make them myself. It was not as easy as I thought, because you need specific materials and you need to find the right recipe. I tried many different recipes and tried to perfect it over time. I asked my friends and family to taste them and they all loved them. So, I thought there might be a market for it in France too.
I decided to launch my business during my degree so I had quite a long time to establish my idea, develop a strategy, test recipes, and see if there was a market. I started selling in Alsace in France right after graduating.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
The product in Hungary is sold with cinnamon, and in the area I launched in France, in Alsace, there is a similar taste and we love cinnamon too. I decided to launch it in France first because I wanted the French name for the company.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
Previously, we mainly sold our products at local markets in the Alsace. Recently we managed to add a new distribution channel, being able to include our Chimney Cakes in 'vending machines' at local farms. This was great, as it made it much easier for us to bring our products to our customers.
Additionally, we're close to launching a new distribution channel in partnership with Baguette Box. This is a service which usually delivers bread to people's houses in the morning, and with the partnership, they will also offer our chimney cakes for delivery in the morning.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Logistics is already a complicated thing to deal with in our line of business, and Covid has just made it even more complicated. Especially, because we often don't have the cash in the bank to react to unexpected changes in the way we would like.
Another challenge we have noticed is that some local markets we've started to sell at, aren't as profitable as we would have hoped. People don't really know the product, so we really need to make people know not only the brand but also the product. Chimney Cakes aren't very well known in France.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I would have taken less time for the strategising part of the business. I wanted to wait until graduating before actually launching the business, but it means I spent far too long thinking about the business without actually acting.
So, in hindsight, I would have been more flexible with my ideas. I would probably have launched it earlier, while I was still at university, and I would have probably launched it in the US too, to test that market.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Don't try to optimise everything in the beginning. Just start doing it, and over time it'll naturally get better.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Try to test your product as soon as possible, go to market, and get customer feedback. Don't spend too long strategising and hypothesising about the idea without actually acting.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
It's hard to be a solo founder. I sometimes wish I had a co-founder, to share the pressure and decision-making. Having a team makes it easier, but the founder takes the biggest risk, and so I still carry that burden on my own.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I really like Elon Musk. It's so impressive how he works on so many different projects at the same time.
What book do you think everyone should read?
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin